Transactional Emails – Your Way to Win Customers’ Hearts

Marketers make much effort convincing their clients to join their brand community and hoping for them to become truly loyal brand ambassadors. Whilst doing so, many fail to notice that their email marketing campaigns focus mainly on revenue generation rather than on building strong and positive relationships. Apart from regular commercial newsletters there are other types of messages, such as transactional ones, which aim to create bonds. If you don’t know what transactional emails are just yet, this article is for you.

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What are transactional emails?

Contrary to the common belief and a bit misleading name, transactional emails aren’t just reserved for e-commerce and buying or selling products online.

Transactional emails are messages automatically sent to individual users in response to their activity e.g. on your website or another email, or aiming to call them to generate a particular action.

Typically, these emails can be targeted at any type of audience. These could be your regular newsletter subscribers, clients or even prospects that are still in the decision-making phase considering your offer. Both, their action or inaction, could trigger the deployment of one of your transactional emails.

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What kind of emails do you have in mind?

You may wonder – “What kind of emails would you classify as transactional?”. In fact, you’re probably seeing many of them on your every day basis, by simply going into your own inbox. The most popular transactional emails we have found are:

Subscription confirmation emails,

Password reset emails,

Order confirmation messages,

Thank you emails sent in response to an action (e.g. survey completion, order placement),

Bank account balance updates,

Autoresponders,

Cart abandonment emails,

Re-engagement emails,

Welcome emails,

Rss-to-email,

Webinar and training invites,

Product delivery time updates,

and many more!

As you can see, you can find many different types of messages to be classified as transactional emails. There are no limits as to what kind of emails will be automatically deployed to your individual subscribers. It depends only on which actions you feel are important and should be triggering your transactional emails.

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Pros

The main advantage of using transactional emails is the fact that they are sent to subscribers individually rather than as a mass delivery. Although this kind of messages can also be effective, it is the emails that take into account demographic and behavioral data that tend to achieve best results. This is because they offer value and truly invite the individual readers to take part in the conversation, which is rather uncommon when it comes to regular promotional newsletters.

Another great advantage of such emails is their time of deployment, which takes into account each individual’s actions. Through delivering your emails right on time when the subscribers are still in front of the screen, you have a greater chance to capture their attention and reach them when their engagement level and purchase intention are the highest.

Your newsletter subscribers will surely be grateful and appreciate your effort when each message they receive will offer them value. Matching of the offer to individual customer’s preferences, needs and actions is something we can only dream of when thinking of other popular promotional channels. Every single email following this pattern will mean more to your audience, which you should expect to see in the increased open and click-thru rates of your email marketing campaigns.

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Effectiveness

OK, so by now you should already know what transactional emails are and how important for your audience they can be. What you may not know is that such emails are effective also in terms of building strong relationships with clients and achieving great conversion rates.

It is thanks to birthday emails, messages thanking for joining the newsletter subscription or an invitation to an upcoming event through which you can shape and mold the bonds between you and your audience. If you promise to offer them value by delivering timely content that is well-suited with their needs and wants, you should not worry about them going out seeking amongst the competition. Provided of course, that you deliver on your promise.

This means there’s nothing else left for you to do, other than to carefully analyze your current communications with your audience and try to find any weaker areas that could be improved by adding automatically deployed, yet at the same time, personalized emails. You can trust me on this one. There is always a spot where you could fill in at least one of such messages if you truly put your customer’s hat on.

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Creative examples

Here are several creative examples of newsletters sent by companies who have already implemented transactional emails into their communicational strategy. Take a look and perhaps some of them will inspire you to go and introduce them into your own marketing program.

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Welcome emails

Welcome emails are messages sent at the moment when your audience is most engaged i.e. right after they have joined the subscription. Although they are extremely effective in terms of starting a conversation and its tone, they aren’t yet universally used. Through them you can introduce your team, offer, ask your subscribers to add you to the contacts list or follow you on other social media channels. It’s an opportunity you should not miss out on.

Adidas welcome email

Sugar Sync welcome email

Do it yourself #1: How can you create a welcome email? It’s plain easy.

All you have to do is to create an Autoresponder, which will be automatically deployed to your audience upon subscription.

You can achieve the same result if you create a time-based Autoresponder and set its date to “0” which refers to the moment of subscription.

Thank you emails

Another great example of transactional emails are thank you messages automatically sent right after a user has performed a particular action. This gives you a great opportunity to build positive relationships with your audience or even to cross-sell on other products that you have in your offer. Showing your gratitude towards subscribers you get to remind them about your brand and make them look more fondly at your offer.

Vemma personalized emails

H&M thank you email

Do it yourself #2: Do you want to find out how to create a successful personalized thank you email, which is displayed in a number of different languages and portrays the picture of the recipient himself? You can read all about it in this post.

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Reengagement emails

A great example of combining the powers of personalization, segmentation and automation are emails which aim at reactivating the subscribers that have stopped opening your messages. Go on and make your audience interested and engaged in the conversation again. Perhaps the only thing stopping them from buying from you is a small coupon, which will motivate them to take action?

Crocs re-engagement newsletter

Do it yourself #3: In order to plan a re-engaging campaign, all you have to do is to locate your inactive subscribers. You can do so by going into Search Contacts and finding the groups of people whose “Last newsletter open date” is before a certain time of the year, which you believe is long enough to be considered inactive. Save the search and create a newsletter with an offer that will dazzle them.

Looking for some more inspiration? Do you want to communicate with your audience even more effectively than ever before? Check out our Book of Inspiration to learn all about the great campaigns you, yourself can do.

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I never would have considered half of the emails you listed as transactional, but when I stopped to think about it, they are. I’ve learned that it’s so important to make emails like these as personal as possible–they have such a bigger impact than generalized, “can be sent to anyone” emails. Thanks for a great read!

KatarzynaPietka

Thank you for your kind words, Marisa. Hope this helps you with your email marketing campaigns

ATSC

How about sending invoices as PDF attached? Possible?

KatarzynaPietka

Hi Allan, if you use GetResponse, you can send attachment files up to 400kB per email – this could also be an invoice file in PDF format.